Yesterday I went to check a thingy on Wiki by using my cellphone. I don't know about other cellphones, but on my model (Sony Ericsson Z530i), the mainpage is divided into four pages. You scroll down and click on Next Page to browse through the pages. Depending on article length, every page is divided into two or more pages.
The thing that makes it uncomfortable is the search option which is placed at the bottom of the last page. If you want to search for something, you'll have to browse to the last page and scroll all the way down. Since this is done on the cellphone and not on a computer, it's obviously not very userfriendly. I don't know if anyone took in consideration cellphone surfing when creating the Wiki pages, but it would be more convinient to have the search option at the top of the first page. Or at least somewhere in the middle. Just a tought.
User:Anittas
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> >On 8/13/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
> A couple years ago a professor at Dartmouth had his students put
> articles on Wikipedia as part of a class project. These kids promprtly
> fell into the notability meat grinder. While it would obviously benefit
> Wikipedia to generate articles from that list, I don't think that that
> many of these kids are ready for some of the abuse that's so frequently
> doled out. Such abuse does nothing to encourage co-operative work among
> people who might never edit Wikipedia anyway.
That is emphatically not what happened. The professor was Peter C. Wayner, by the way...
What happened is that the class instructions specifically told students to stay "within the definition" and gave a link to WP:NOT. Approximately FOUR HUNDRED articles were submitted. Most of them had no obvious connections with Dartmouth College and passed more or less unnoticed.
One example is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beautifull_Cassandra , an article about a piece of juvenalia by Jane Austen. You'll notice it was never nominated for deletion.
Despite being told to read WP:NOT, perhaps forty articles were submitted dealing with fairly subtrivial aspects of Dartmouth life, such as entire articles on one relatively less notable a capella singing group, drinking games specific to one particular Dartmouth fraternity, etc. Many of these articles were written in breezy, promotional language.
Indeed, there was bad behavior on the Wikipedian side. One notably brusque admin famous for nominating many articles for deletion made snide remarks in many of the nominations, and by the time uncivil AfD-ers had gone through half a dozen of them, many people started using dismissive language. If I recall correctly an article on something about DartMOOR in England got some comment about "they're at it again." Very unpleasant. But only about 10% of the students fell into the "meat grinder," and fewer would have if they had followed the professor's directions.
Of the subtrivial articles, many of them were de-breezed and boiled down and merged into the Dartmouth College article.
Far from being discouraged, Wayner repeated the exercise the following summer. There was a little more preparation at both the Dartmouth and Wikipedia ends and there were no problems.
One of MyWikiBiz's client's articles has been picked up by AfD. It's
obviously going to be a pretty significant test case for the future of
this kind of business, so it's worth while discussing it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Norman_Technol…
My position is that Wikipedia's mission is absolutely not served by
deleting this (or similar) articles. It's informative (could be more
so!), it's neutral, and there are people out there looking for this
kind of article. I would like to hear any arguments for deleting it.
Now, is it just me, or do we have a serious bias against corporations?
Steve
G'day geni,
> On 8/15/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher(a)student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
>
>> * Speedy deletion (it's vanity! You must speedy it!)
>
> CSD A7
An article can be vanity and still not speediable. People seem to
interpret A7, however, to mean anything that they think is vanity
(whether it is or not; whether it's a good article or not) must be speedied.
>> * Image copyright (if you tag it as "fair use" it can't be deleted!)
>
> Fortunetly there is a loophole in the current set up with no one
> appears to have found a way to close.
Well, there's always IfD. Also, there are moves (successful?) to make
fair-use-with-a-shit-rationale speediable. Either way, it's deletable,
if not right away. {{fairuse}} doesn't make you safe.
--
Mark Gallagher
"What? I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse
There are two problems with letting just anybody upload images:
1) Copyright law is very complex. Most people don't understand it.
2) Most people *aren't aware* that they don't understand it.
By letting everyone upload images to Wikipedia, we're telling them
that we trust them to understand what is and is not allowed. Then, we
turn around and bite them by deleting their images when, inevitably,
they make mistakes. It confuses people no end to be told that they
both are and aren't able to upload images correctly.
I see this confusion every day, in the questions on my talkpage, or on
OrphanBot's user and talkpages, or on the image-related pages in
Wikipedia:-space. I haven't had OrphanBot go through the 35,000 talk
pages that it's left messages on, but I expect that if I did, I'd find
hundreds more questions, unanswered because nobody ever saw them.
I also see this in the form of users floundering around, trying out
different templates to see which one will get the bot off their back,
or using clearly-incorrect templates based on a misunderstanding of
copyright, or making up template-like statements because they don't
understand what a template is, or providing "fair use rationales" that
amount to little more than a statement of "I once heard these words in
a copyright context".
I don't have the time to deal with this confusion by explaining
Wikipedia's policies to everyone, and most uploaders don't stick
around long enough to learn. The best I can do is respond to the
occasional user who finds their way to my talkpage.
Much of the image deletion policy is based around the fact that there
are maybe a dozen people on Wikipedia who understand the image use
policy well enough to enforce it, and are willing to take the time to
do so. At the same time, over two thousand new images are uploaded
each day, adding to the 553,000 images already on Wikipedia.
By making image uploading a privilege to be earned rather than a right
conferred by registering an account, we can relax the policy and deal
with uploaders individually, rather than automated notification of
problems and nearly-automated deletion of problematic images.
--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]
On 8/15/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Fred Bauder replied, silently "fixing" the word "lede", after which
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> <snip quote>
> > It actually can be spelt "lede".
I should have changed the topic at this point, my apologies.
Steve
> From: Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com>
> But on the other hand, the "enforcement" of the policy
> has been getting so zealous lately that I don't have too much
> trouble imagining editor A saying "the sky is blue" and editor B
> demanding a verifiable citation lest the assertion be deleted as
> original research.
>
> It "ought" to be the case that "obvious" facts, which "everybody
> knows", can be inserted without explicit citation.
Obviously "the sky is blue" should not be deleted. But it's a rather
bad example for your purpose, as I recently noted on a talk page.
In the first place, the sky is "not" always blue, and therefore this
is a "fact" that is not really quite true. In the second place, as is
so often the case of things that "can't be sourced because they're
just common knowledge," it is ''very'' easily sourced:
"the blue sky is so commonplace that it is taken for granted" {{cite
book|title=A Field Guide to the Atmosphere|first=Vincent J.|
last=Schaefer|coauthors=John A. Day|year=1998|publisher=Houghton
Mifflin Field Guides|id=ISBN 0395976316}}
I also found:
The poet [[Robert Service]] says "while the blue sky bends above/
You've got nearly all that matters;" songwriter [[Irving Berlin]]
wrote of "[[Blue Skies (song)|Blue Skies]] smiling at me," airmen fly
into the [[The U.S. Air Force (song)|wild blue yonder]].
{{cite book|title=Collected Poems of Robert Service|first=Robert|
last=Service|year=1940|publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons|id=ISBN
0-399-15015-3}},</ref>
For the sky _not_ always being blue: Matthew 16:2, Jesus says to the
Pharisees "When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for
the sky is red."
"At twilight, salmon reds, oranges, purples, white-yellows, and many
shades of blue can be seen."
{{cite book|title=Light and Colour in the Outdoors|first=M. G. J.|
last=Minnaert|origyear=1974|year=1993|publisher=Springer-Verlag|
id=ISBN 0-387-97935-2}} p. 295
And songwriter [[Oscar Hammerstein II|Oscar Hammerstein]]'s famously
wrote of "when the sky is a bright canary yellow."<ref>{{cite book|
title=American Musical|first=Marc|last=Bauch|publisher=Tectum Verlag|
id=ISBN 382888458X}} </ref>
It took me less than ten minutes to turn up the "serious" sources
(Schaeffer and Minnaert) another fifteen to find the rest. If
something is really a commonly known fact, it is just not that hard
to source. And the effort to do so _often_ yields dividends.
This is not to say that requests for citations can't be abused. But,
if I am an editor, and I inserted something without a source because
I didn't really think it needed one, and someone marked it "citation
needed," my response would be to source it. This has happened to me,
and it's what I've done. Except in one case... where I couldn't find
one... and so I removed the item myself.